Is it over?

 And just like that it’s over,

We tend to our wounded; we mourn our dead.

People left and right wonder if this really means freedom

(Not yet?)

Apologies to Lin-Manuel Miranda for bastardising Hamilton there. However, I feel as if this quote best sums up the developments over the last 48 hours here in Ireland. In a sweeping announcement on Friday, January 21st, 2022, Micheal Martin announced that the vast majority of COVID-19 related restrictions would be lifted effective 6 AM on the following day, January 22nd. Just as quickly as they had been introduced, social distancing guidelines, restricted opening times for pubs and restaurants, or the work-from-home mandate were relegated to the recycling bin. While mask mandates remain in place for the time being, they are due to be revisited at the end of February and are likely to fall by the wayside then. This is all brilliant news, but for some reason, I can’t really get myself to celebrate this. Two years after the world turned upside down, can this really be it? Is it really over?

To be blunt, even the fact that I can have these thoughts is a massive success for Ireland, achieved not only by the surprisingly disciplined reaction of the people of Ireland themselves when it came to complying with these measures, but also due to the incredibly successful vaccination drive here in Ireland. Even by the time the booster campaign started in Fall of 2021, well over 90% of eligible people here in Ireland had gotten fully vaccinated. At the time of writing, this figure stands at over 95%, while 65% of those eligible had received their booster shots, including of course yours truly. Hey, what did you expect? I’m not throwing away my shot! Whilst there have been bumps in the road, including high-profile government ministers and judges flaunting the rules early in the pandemic, Ireland has been able to achieve these remarkable results without losing much of its social cohesion. When you consider that supposedly highly educated and advanced countries like Germany are struggling to get past the 80% vaccination mark and are dealing with an ever-increasing groundswell of neofascists and neo-Nazis that are aiming to undermine German democracy under the guise of the Querdenker (lateral thinker) movement, it really drives home the Irish success in this matter.

Yet for some reason, I feel just as disoriented, if not more, as on that one March day back in 2021 when then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar had announced the beginning of these emergency measures. How will things play out from here? How will we transition to working back in the office, now that many people, at least those in office jobs, have tasted working from home? Also, the virus is still out there and will likely continue to mutate, especially as global vaccine inequity and ongoing anti-science agitation by far-right activists and religious fanatics turn the global south into a massive bioreactor. How will we be able to cope with that? Will we go back into renewed lockdowns in September or October? 

More importantly, have we really learned enough from this pandemic to be able to deal with the next one? Make no mistake, as humanity continues to grow and settlements push deeper and deeper into the last few remaining areas of wilderness on this planet, the potential for species-jumping events will continue to increase, and there’s no guarantee that the next virus will be as comparatively mild and forgiving as SARS-CoV-2 has turned out to be. Do we as a society have the will to strengthen both our medical and disaster response capabilities as well as our law enforcement and public order forces to ensure that any future pandemic can be handled to at least a certain extent? Given how quickly business returned to normal in the political landscape even as the first phase of the pandemic was still raging, I have my doubts about that. COVID-19 seems like a warning shot that stirred everyone up for a short while but was otherwise ignored.